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Doomed Xycanthus Reviews
Author: Eric Mayer
Date: 2003
ADRIFT 4.0
Reviewed by Dan Shiovitz
I played through this with Emily, so I feel obliged to add a few comments to what she's already said. I agree that the game is in many ways shallow and
somewhat roughly-written; it would have benefited both from proof-reading and from adjusting several aspects of the gameplay. On the other hand, having just
played through all the games from the '01 IF Competition, it was easy to see this game had a, hmm, fundamental spark of originality that most of those games
lacked. This was partly aided by the game's smallness and incomplete development; had it been more fleshed out it may have been that my imagination
wouldn't have had as much room to fill in good bits as it did here. But still, there's something fundamentally right about a lost city in the midst of a
mysterious forest and this game does that well; there are weird beasts and skeletal toes scattered around outside, and a creepy civilization inside. The
quality of realness is, more or less, that a thing which has it feels as though it exists independently from the game which describes it, as though when you
turn off the game, *it keeps going*. Maybe it's just, again, the smallness of Doomed Xycanthus that gives it that quality, and I'm filling in the rest of the
world myself. But for me there were enough hints of an extended city and peopled
world beyond to make this real. Having just finished playing through the comp games, as I said, I realize again how rare and valuable this quality is.
I can't
completely recommend Mayer's game, what with the aforementioned problems with game design and writing. But it's worth playing if only to try and see how a small game gets something fundamental right.
Reviewed by David Whyld (1)
Eric Mayer's first ADRIFT game - Lost - was a strange one with little or no plot. His second - Doomed Xycanthus - was a far different sort of game. Larger,
more detailed and plotted - and overall a far better game.
As Doomed Xycanthus starts, you are in the midst of a forest with no knowledge as to how you arrived there and no idea what to do next. Following a brief fight
with a "nightmare creature", you discover a gem embedded in your left hand and a
brief note from a wizard by the name of Malevol. It appears Malevol has cursed you with forgetfulness and dumped you in the middle of nowhere as payback for
stealing his daughter's virtue. So starts the game.
I have to confess that after the beginning, I was surprised to find that the aforementioned Malevol the wizard did not make another appearance. I was half
expecting Doomed Xycanthus to turn out to be a hunt-the-wizard-and-exact-revenge
sort of game but instead it turns out to be more a hunt for treasure in the city
of the game's title. While this is no bad thing in itself - the storyline as you
wander around the wilderness outside Xycanthus and then subsequently inside the ruined city itself is well written and has impressive depth - but I was
expecting at every moment for Malevol to show up and when the game finished and there was no sign of him, I couldn't help feeling a little disappointed.
That isn't to say that Doomed Xycanthus is a bad game - far from it. It has some
intricate puzzles - the one involving the snake being an interesting one, as well as the letters which allow you access to the ruined city - and the
locations are often lengthy and detailed. The style of writing is overall very impressive, lending the game an eerie atmosphere, particularly during the times
when you wander around the city of Xycanthus itself.
One aspect of the game I found frustrating - and something that, thankfully, seems to be getting rarer and rarer in text adventures these days - is its liking for killing the player off for making a single bad move. Sometimes there are warnings about what will happen if you go a certain way but more often than
not these warnings are subtle to the point that they will most likely be missed,
leaving the poor player to have to reload time and time again. Maybe this isn't such a bad thing as it encourages you to read the location descriptions more
carefully than you normally would and anyone who just rushes through a game without reading where he is going is liable to wind up dead more than a few
times.
All in all, this is a well above average game that suffers from a little too
much guess-the-verb (the puzzle involving the statue is an unusual one that it is doubtful you would manage to guess without the hints) but the standard of writing and the atmospheric location descriptions more then compensate. From the
ending I would have guessed that this was the first part in a series of adventures but as nothing has come out in the months since then it seems
unfortunately not which is a pity because this is a standard of game we see too little of.
Logic: 8 out of 10
Aside from the strange puzzle involving the statue, the puzzles were straightforward enough to be guessed (for the most part anyway) without
resorting to the hints system.
Problems: 10 out of 10 (10 = no problems)
None that I encountered.
Story: 7 out of 10
Had this been a story of you seeking to gain revenge on the wizard who stole your memories, I would have given it more than 7 out of the 10 but the storyline
as it is just didn't strike me as quite so interesting.
Characters: 7 out of 10
Only one, but he has an impressive amount of subjects you can question him about.
Writing: 8 out of 10
Atmospheric locations and an overall impressive style.
Game: 8 out of 10
A decent well written game that might not have been what it seemed to be from the beginning but very good nevertheless.
Overall: 48 out of 60
Reviewed by David Whyld (2)
Eric Mayer's first ADRIFT game, Lost, was a strange one with little or no plot -- playable and even kind of likeable but hardly the sort of thing that was ever
going to be remembered. His second, Doomed Xycanthus, is a far different sort of
game. It's larger, with more details and a more complex plot, and overall a far better game.
As Doomed Xycanthus starts, you are in the midst of a forest with no memory as to how you arrived there and little or no idea of what to do next. Following a
brief fight with a "nightmare creature", you discover a gem embedded in your left hand and a brief note from a wizard by the name of Malevol. It appears
Malevol has cursed you with forgetfulness and dumped you in the middle of nowhere as payback for stealing his daughter's virtue. So starts the game.
I have to confess that after the beginning, I was surprised to find that the
aforementioned Malevol the wizard did not make another appearance. I was half expecting Doomed Xycanthus to turn out to be a
hunt-the-wizard-and-exact-your-revenge sort of game but instead it turns out to be more a hunt for treasure in the city of the game's title. While this is no bad thing in itself -- the storyline as you wander around the wilderness outside
Xycanthus and then subsequently inside the ruined city itself is well written and has impressive depth -- I was anticipating Malevol at every moment. When the
game finished and there was no sign of him, I couldn't help feeling a little disappointed. The game reaching a conclusion without any kind of appearance from
the evil wizard left me feeling as if matters hadn't been properly resolved.
That isn't to say that Doomed Xycanthus is a bad game -- far from it. It has some intricate puzzles -- the one involving the snake and the pool is an interesting one (if a little on the overly-complicated side), as well as the letters which allow you access to the ruined city -- and the locations are often
lengthy and detailed. The style of writing is overall very impressive, lending
the game an eerie atmosphere, particularly during the times when you wander around the city of Xycanthus itself.
One aspect of the game I found frustrating -- and something that, thankfully, seems to be getting rarer and rarer in text adventures these days -- is its zeal
to kill the player off for making a single bad move. Sometimes there are warnings about what will happen if you go a certain way but more often than not
these warnings are subtle to the point that they will most likely be missed, leaving the poor player to have to reload time and time again. Often, after I'd
died and started again, I was able to spot the warnings and avoid them subsequent times but it was still frustrating being killed for doing nothing
more than moving in the wrong direction. Maybe this isn't such a bad thing as it
encourages you to read the location descriptions more carefully than you might normally do and anyone who just rushes through this game without reading where
he/she is going is liable to wind up dead more than a few times.
All in all, this is a well above average game that suffers from a little too much guess-the-verb (the puzzle involving the statue is an unusual one that it is doubtful you would manage to guess without the hints) but the standard of writing and the atmospheric location descriptions more then compensate for any
shortcomings. From the ending I would have guessed that this was the first part in a series of adventures (hints are given that you're going to set off after
Malevol the wizard) but as nothing has come out in the months since then it seems unfortunately not which is a pity because this is the sort of game we see
too little of.
Reviewed by Emily Short
Ordinarily, I can't play ADRIFT games: I lack easy access to a Windows machine (or at least one on which I can install things at will). The other day, however,
I was at Dan Shiovitz's house, and we decided to try Eric Mayer's Doomed
Xycanthus. Since this is the first ADRIFT game I have ever played, so I am not sure how much of my criticism applies to the system as a whole and how much to
the game. I tried to be fair and flag items that might be the fault of the system as a whole, but if I miss the boat, apologies in advance.
Eric Mayer's Doomed Xycanthus plays with one of the standard sources of IF atmosphere: a ruined city with a mysterious secret. This is not in itself necessarily a recipe for cliched writing and game-play; as in many other cases, what the author adds to the trope is more important than the repetitive nature
of the trope itself. Mayer has dressed up his setting with a number of interesting touches, hinting at a peculiar lost religion and a decadent, wealthy
society.
Unfortunately for the player, the world-building is in fact fairly slight and shallow. Some of the problem is simply depth of implementation: there are only a
handful of rooms devoted to the ruined city (far fewer than are given to the forest surrounding it); each of these contains only a few objects -- several
bits of examinable scenery, and perhaps one item that may be taken. Moreover, the information that you can glean from these items all point to the same basic
two or three facts: this was a decadent society with a weird religion. You find more information to reinforce that point, but very little to adumbrate any
greater nuance or complexity.
So as a world in which to wander around, this one leaves something to be desired. Of the weird things that one may find, there is often very little underlying logic, little to explain why or how the things got that way. Other than the oft-invoked rule that strange religions always leave behind strange machinery and artifacts, that is.
The game play is also somewhat deficient. One spends the first half of the game wandering around a not-very-interesting forest. There are various scenery
objects in the forest, but there's not much there by way of plot. More frustratingly, there is an assortment of random-death rooms. Some of these are
more or less signaled in advance, if you happen to have noticed the hints; others are as far as I can tell not signaled at all. It is a truth universally
acknowledged that game-ending sudden-death traps, unprovided with warnings in advance, that befall you just because you happen to explore a certain direction,
are Bad Game Design. But I find that I resent this all the more in the context of
ADRIFT, where you cannot undo a game-ending move. Instead you're forced to
restart and then after the restart restore a save. Arrgh. One of these unfair sudden deaths remarks self-consciously that there was perhaps not enough
warning. Well, how cute. I'm sorry; it still doesn't excuse doing that in the first place. So, like, don't.
Puzzles. There are some, and they are rather unintuitive. Or rather: one of them
is easy if you've got the right information (but there's nothing obvious to tell
you where that information would be if you happen not to have run across it), and one of them was impossible without hints. (Another irritation, possibly the
effect of ADRIFT as well, is that the game chides you for asking for hints in the first place. I suppose this is appropriate to the Old Skool of game design
in which the parser is allowed to snark at the player extensively for his lack of playing cleverness, but I find more and more that problems with puzzles are
often at least as much the author's fault as they are mine, and consequently the
snarky parser just seems to add insult to injury.) Nor do any of the puzzles seem to anticipate reasonable but incorrect attempts to solve them, so that the
player can try a number of apparently perfectly intelligent actions with no real
feedback about what is going wrong, or where to go from there.
There were some surface flaws as well. Descriptions did not always change after events that should certainly have affected them; a door is described as locked
after you have already opened it, for instance. There is a bug that has to do with the map - and again, I'm not sure whether this is Mayer's fault or
ADRIFT's
- such that when you click on a certain location the game refuses to take you there or even, apparently, to recognize that location. Everywhere else generates
a nifty auto-go command, which is certainly convenient - except when ADRIFT's shortest-path-finding routine takes you through rooms that you have not yet
visited, so you find the prose whipping by without a chance to examine it. This is irritating.
The game could use a careful spell-checking. The tone of the writing is also a bit peculiar: there are bits of humor embedded in the horrific, breaking the
mood a bit. In spots the writing is also an odd combination of the excessive and
the banal, remarking chattily and casually about eyes that glow red with hatred and creatures that scuttle in the dark. The descriptive passages are sometimes
more clever than specific. Mayer hauls out the big-time vocabulary ("lambent light,"
eg), but the resulting descriptions are often confusing rather than evocative. Several times during the play session I was left blinking at the room
description, trying to figure out the geography of the territory, because it seemed not to be what I had assumed from the previous descriptions.
Despite its deficiencies, however, this game is not without its points. It's an
unambitious, unpretentious piece that can be enjoyed in a fairly short play session. Some of the backstory is intriguing, though I would have liked to know a bit more about it - here, having the world-building better fleshed out would
have been nice. On the whole, I found that I enjoyed it most if I approached it on its own terms, rather than expecting the same sort of experience I expect
from a full-length game in one of the major IF languages.
Reviewed by MileStyle
Evil wizards, ancient ruins, and the obligatory death at every corner!
From the very beginning of Doomed Xycanthus I thought that pace would be an essential ingredient within the game as the player is immediately presented with
a situation in which the next few turns will ultimately determine whether or not
he/she reads verification on their untimely death. This pace, however, was only the introduction - the game seemed to back down after this.
Containing the staple diet of a number of fantasy stories: wizards, old
mythologies, and magic swords, Eric Mayer has made a game no different to numerous other fantasy titles available, whether in
ADRIFT or beyond. Interestingly though, the player is forced to read the descriptions closely and
think carefully before making each move.
The story within seems limited and uses a deus ex machina at the very beginning to reveal the game's plot. The prose, at most, is minimal but this approach does
not suit the game overall - some writing confuses tense, and a spelling mistake was also spotted although this is probably only noticeable to the eye of
scrutiny.
Events in the game are well handled, varied, and create a touch of atmosphere, and the author has obviously spent a lot of time increasing the game's interactivity as using keywords and objects - nine times out of ten - produced a
favourable response.
With respect to size, Doomed Xycanthus contains a fair number of locations to explore, tasks to execute, and objects to interact with; interacting with the
game's characters, however, is typically limited to killing.
So, all cons aside, Eric Mayer's game provides us with a simple story, the chance to solve some puzzles and explore an interesting locale. Fans of fantasy
IF may just find this piece just the thing they need to whittle away an afternoon; but be warned, however, making the wrong choices will have you
reloading the game again and again until you find that it also helps pass the evening too.
Reviews should be considered copyrighted by their respective authors.
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